Robust metric for the evaluation of visual saliency algorithms

In this paper, we analyzed eye fixation data obtained from 15 observers and 1003 images. When studying the eigen-decomposition of the correlation matrix constructed based on the fixation data of one observer viewing all images, it was observed that 23% of the data can be accounted for by one eigenvector. This finding implies a repeated viewing pattern that is independent of image content. Examination of this pattern revealed that it was highly correlated with the center region of the image. The presence of a repeated viewing pattern raised the following question: can we use the statistical information contained in the first eigenvector to filter out the fixations that were part of the pattern from those that are image feature dependent? To answer this question we designed a robust AUC metric that uses statistical analysis to better judge the goodness of the different saliency algorithms.